Many modern vehicles include built-in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to provide automated safety and/or assisted driving functionality. For example, these advanced driver assistance systems can have applications to implement adaptive cruise control, automatic parking, automated braking, blind spot monitoring, collision avoidance, driver drowsiness detection, lane departure warning, or the like. The next generation of vehicles can include autonomous driving (AD) systems to control and navigate the vehicles independent of human interaction.
These vehicles typically include multiple sensors, such as one or more cameras, a Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) sensor, a Radio Detection and Ranging (Radar) system, or the like, to measure different portions of the environment around the vehicles. Each sensor processes their own measurements captured over time to detect an object within their field of view, and then provide a list of detected objects to an application in the advanced driver assistance systems or the autonomous driving systems to which the sensor is dedicated. In some instances, the sensors can also provide a confidence level corresponding to their detection of objects on the list based on their captured measurements.
The applications in the advanced driver assistance systems or the autonomous driving systems can utilize the list of objects received from their corresponding sensors and, in some cases, the associated confidence levels of their detection, to implement automated safety and/or driving functionality. For example, when a radar sensor in the front of a vehicle provides the advanced driver assistance system in the vehicle a list having an object in a current path of the vehicle, the application corresponding to front-end collision in the advanced driver assistance system can provide a warning to the driver of the vehicle or control vehicle in order to avoid a collision with the object.
Because each application has dedicated sensors, the application can receive a list of objects from the dedicated sensors that provides the application a fixed field of view in around a portion of the vehicle. When multiple sensors for an application have at least partially overlapping fields of view, the application can integrate object lists from its multiple dedicated sensors for the fixed field of view around the portion of the vehicle for the application. Since the vehicle moves, however, having a narrow field of view provided from the sensors can leave the application blind to potential objects. Conversely, widening the field of view can increase cost, for example, due to additional sensors, and add data processing latency.